I have been playing around with Celestia for a few months now. I have been working on textures for extrasolar planets in my own mind. I wanted to mention this because I felt warm inside for doing it, I couldn't think of any other way that the first four planets of 55 Cancri would look like without thinking of John Whatmough. I had to make the planets look the exact same way he made them. Though personally I have never talked with him, if it wasn't for this site, I wouldn't have liked extrasolar planets as much as I do now. Do you think I got the planets to look pretty close to what John made them?

In the 55 Cancri add-on I am working on, it includes every scientifically noted objects around the star (including the plausible "g" and "h" planets, as well as the Kuiper belt).

Hey not bad! And yeah, Whatmough's art inspired me about this very star system as well. Looks to me like you approximated his artwork pretty well. As far as I know, it's based of the Sudarsky Classification System, so it isn't as if it's purely fictional. I, too, have made a 55 Cancri A system whose planets resemble Johns work, with some slight alterations. Here's my 55 Cnc system in Celestia, I'll throw in f just for completeness.

Hmmm... I have a system for Celestia as well. I'll have to get the latest version of Celestia loaded and post the pics. I'll try to get to that tonight.

_________________"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." Carl Sagan

Sirius_Alpha wrote:Is anyone able to access John Whatmough's artwork on the EVI forum? I recently found myself able to, and immediately backed it up to my computer.

EVI is currently not working for me, but I think I will do the same thing once it is back up. I am currently working on a project (lovingly called "Extrasolar Visions") that has my and John's ideas for planets. Would anyone like to see some of them?